19th-century statue beheaded
THE statue of a 19th-century Northern California rancher and meat-packing magnate was decapitated earlier this week, leaving investigators in the state's capital city scratching their heads to find a motive behind the vandalism.
Tipsters could receive a $1000 reward for information about what befell the nearly century-old granite statue of Charles Swanston in Sacramento's William Land Park on Monday. The severed head was found on the ground nearby.
Swanston traveled west from Ohio as part of the California Gold Rush and quickly realized he'd make more money as a butcher, according to Sacramento City Historian Marcia Eymann.
Police are investigating whether the vandal — or vandals — had a beef with the Swanstons or if it was a random act.
"I have no idea why anyone, unless they're vegetarians and didn't like meat-packers" would do this to the statue, Eymann said Wednesday. "I find this very bizarre."
The statue is the work of the late sculptor Ralph Stackpole, a famous San Francisco artist during the Great Depression era.
An early Sacramento pioneer and settler, Swanston then became a rancher and started a meat-packing business that made him rich. His son
pin the 1920s commissioned the statue, which is part of a fountain, and donated it to the city after Swanston's death in 1911 at 101 years old, The Sacramento Bee reported.
The family's ranch was located on what's now William Land Park. Eymann said if not for his son's donation, the city would likely have never put up a piece for Swanston.
"Not that anybody knows who he is, but that's something very special that Sacramento had and now it's destroyed," she said.
Bats plunge to ground in cold SOME 1600 bats found a temporary home this week in the attic of a Houston Humane Society director, but it wasn’t because they made it their roost.
It was a temporary recovery space for the flying mammals after they lost their grip and plunged to the pavement after going into hypothermic shock during the city’s recent cold snap.
On Wednesday, over 1,500 will be released back to their habitats -- two Houston-area bridges -- after wildlife rescuers scooped them up and saved them by administering fluids and keeping them warm in incubators.
Mary Warwick, the wildlife director at the Houston Humane Society, said she was out doing holiday shopping when the freezing winds reminded her that she hadn’t heard how the bats were doing in the unusually cold temperatures for the region. So she drove to the bridge where over 100 bats looked to be dead as they lay frozen on the ground.
But during her 40-minute drive home, Warwick said they began to come back to life, chirping and moving around in a box where she collected them and placed them on her heated passenger seat for warmth. She put the bats in incubators and returned to the bridge twice a day to collect more.
Two days later, she got a call about more than 900 bats rescued from a bridge in nearby Pearland, Texas. On the third and fourth day, more people showed up to rescue bats from the Waugh Bridge in Houston, and a coordinated transportation effort was set up to get the bats to
Warwick.
After reaching out to other bat rehabilitators, Warwick said it was too many for any one person to feed and care for and the society’s current facilities did not have the necessary space, so they put them in her attic where they were separated by colony in dog kennels and able to reach a state of hibernation that did not require them to eat.
“As soon as I wake up in the morning I wonder: ‘How are they doing, I need to go see them,’ ” Warwick said.
Now, nearly 700 bats are scheduled to be set back in the wild Wednesday at the Waugh Bridge and about 850 at the bridge in Pearland as temperatures in the region are warming. She said over 100 bats died due to the cold, some because the fall itself — ranging 15-30 feet — from the bridges killed them; 56 are recovering at the Bat World sanctuary; and 20 will stay with Warwick a bit longer.
The humane society is now working to raise money for facility upgrades that would include a bat room, Warwick added. Next month, Warwick — the only person who rehabilitates bats in Houston — said the society’s entire animal rehabilitation team will be vaccinated against rabies and trained in bat rehabilitation as they prepare to move into a larger facility with a dedicated bat room.